Is your business struggling to market itself like it used to? Marketing isn’t as simple as it once was. Gone are the days when an effective store sign or billboard was all you needed to stand out and reach your target audience. While these tactics may still be successful, to reach clients today your business will likely need to do more, like invest in marketing software. To compete in today’s digital landscape you’ll need the recommended marketing software that can make your business successful.

There is a lot of marketing software available to help your manufacturing business, and it’s important to choose the correct marketing software and technology. Maybe your business needs help acquiring new leads, improving SEO, or gaining an in-depth understanding of your customer journey?

Whatever you are looking to do for your business, there’s marketing software out there to help you. We asked Digital Marketing and Web Design experts from Chicago for their opinion on the marketing software that can make your business successful. Using a combination of these marketing software options can greatly improve your business performance.


Recommended Marketing Software That Can Make Your Business Successful

There are a lot of options out there for marketing software. The key is understanding in what category your manufacturing business needs assistance. If your business is failing to generate leads you want to consider lead capture and customer behavior. Or if customers are becoming leads but failing to take action you want to focus on nurturing those relationships to maximize conversion.

Understanding where your business is underperforming is important in choosing the correct marketing software strategy. Need some additional help evaluating your business? Check out our blog on how to evaluate the health of your business? (will post after SWOT blog and add the link here) If you already know where your manufacturing business can do better, keep reading to learn more about effective marketing software.

Capture More Leads for Your Manufacturing Business

This is one of the most common issues that manufacturing businesses report. Acquiring new leads is difficult and the cost-per-lead continues to increase. Finding quality leads is crucial for a manufacturing business’s success. Check out the marketing software below that can completely transform your lead acquisition performance.

Recommended Marketing Software

Use Leadfeeder to discover more manufacturing leads

What if we told you that your manufacturing business already has leads, you just can’t see them? That’s right. With Leadfeeder you can reveal website visitors using a reverse IP lookup to see the names of companies visiting your website, but failing to submit any forms. In other words, you can start targeting the companies visiting your website, even if they don’t reach out. These leads are already interested in your company and are worth looking into. The best part, you can capture new leads for free with the FREE trial. It’s a marketing software that you need to capture the additional leads you have been missing.

Gain More Leads by Understanding Your Website Visitors’ Behavior

Customers that visit your website are the ideal leads since you’ve already made them aware of your business and got them to your website. The issue is not all of these customers take the desired action, and while you might not be able to capture every visitor, you could be missing out on some. If you do not understand your customer’s journey then you can’t be sure at what specific point(s) your website visitors are dropping off.

Perhaps a webpage isn’t loading right, or something is confusing your visitors? Maybe the information they are looking for was buried too deeply on the site, or they needed more information but the contact option wasn’t readily available. To capture more leads, you have to make sure your website isn’t losing customers on their journey. By using Crazyegg, a heat mapping marketing software, you can understand your customer’s journey better. The data shows where customers are spending their time and clicking, and where they aren’t! This information can help you address issues that are causing customers frustration or confusion. Ready to set up heatmapping marketing software for your website? Contact the web design experts!

Use Ad Retargeting to Capture More Leads

Have you heard of Ad-Retargeting? It’s one of the fastest-growing Ad types, and it’s no secret why. These ads are much more successful than other PPC ad types because they target the customers who have already expressed interest in your product or service. They can also be configured to target potential customers that express the same behavior as your current website visitor profile.

Using Ad Retargeting you can target the customers who visited your website but failed to convert. These ads are much more likely to be noticed by your target audience and result in clicks. Since they are already familiar with your business, they are much more likely to choose your business when they are ready to purchase. Setting up an expert Ad Retargeting campaign can pay off in dividends. There’s a reason it’s quickly becoming one of the most popular marketing software options available.

Target Your Audience By Location with Geofencing

That’s right, geo-targeted ads. Using geofencing you can focus on a specific location to target with ads. Draw your ‘fence’ and users who enter the space with their device will start receiving your ads when they go online. The best part, these ads don’t just display while users are within the geo-fence, they will display across all connected devices for a selected duration.

Using geofencing you can target major industry events like Trade Shows or conferences, cities you service, or even a competitor’s location. There are numerous potential uses for marketing software like geofencing if you choose to be creative.


How to Nurture Leads with Marketing Software

Finding and acquiring leads is important, but what should your business do once they have started acquiring new leads? It is equally important for your business to nurture the leads they have received. Using the right marketing software you can nurture your leads and build a relationship with your target audience as you move them closer to conversion. Read on to learn about some of the best lead nurturing marketing software.

Maintain Your Customer Database with a CRM System

Once you have acquired new leads you’ll want to keep track of them and collect more information. Having a strong CRM system is a critical part of maintaining a successful customer relationship. By using a CRM like Hubspot you can keep your customer’s information in one place, organized, and readily accessible. This data can also be fed into other software like Ad Retargeting or Email Marketing to strengthen your marketing efforts. You can also create processes like sales journeys or categories for your leads. Overall, a CRM is essential to maintaining a successful customer relationship.

Nurture Your Leads Through Email Marketing

Keeping in constant contact with your leads is an important part of the lead nurturing process. Email marketing allows you a unique opportunity for your business to speak directly to your customers at a time that is convenient for them. With targeted email campaigns you can reach your audience at critical stages of the buying cycle and improve your conversion rates. Email marketing campaigns are still considered a critical aspect of a successful marketing strategy.

Through email marketing, you can share business updates, promotions, or other unique aspects of your business and its offerings. Your business can leverage unique campaigns for new leads, cart abandoners, or past customers, tweaking the messaging for each. By personalizing these campaigns you can build a better long-term relationship with your target audience. Mailchimp offers a FREE service that you can get started with.

Use Press Releases to Reach More Customers with Newsworthy Announcements

By using a Press Release platform you can generate publicity, gain attention and reach a larger audience with your announcements. Using a press release is a great way to spark interest in your brand. Share your company‘s events and announcements, new products and services, and other newsworthy content through verified channels. Your business should consider press releases as a key component of a successful content marketing strategy. Creating a buzz with your Press Releases ensures that your business is continuously creating engaging content for your target audience.

Choosing the correct press release platform is an important step in your marketing strategy. The platform’s software will push your press release to thousands of related websites, journals, and news sources. With industry-specific messaging, you don’t want your articles appearing in unrelated categories because it won’t hold any value for that audience. Choosing a platform that provides analytics and distribution history is the best way to verify that you are actually reaching your target audience. If you’ve never written a press release and are unsure of the best platforms to use, consider having your custom press release written and distributed by experts.


Improve Your Marketing Efforts with Website Optimization

When you are brainstorming ways to improve your marketing efforts, you might be thinking of direct marketing efforts like ads, emails, and gathering new leads. But an important factor to make any of these efforts successful is to evaluate your website. In today’s digital world every business needs a website, and that website serves as the public brochure for your brand.

Visitors evaluate your brand and quality based on their impression of your website. According to online statistics you have about .05 seconds until a user forms an opinion about your website. Your website needs to be functional, user-friendly, and compliant.

Creating an Accessible Website

Creating an Accessible Website

One of the important things your business can implement right away is to make sure that your website is accessible to those with disabilities. Not only is this important because you can reach a larger audience, but you also can avoid large fines for failing to meet ADA website requirements. Fines can vary greatly but you can expect a fine to range between $75,000 and $150,000.

To make sure that your website is ADA compliant you can install software that does it for you. With Accessibe you can install and monitor a software solution that works with most websites which will make your website compliant with WCAG 2.1, ADA, and Section 508. If you don’t know how to install it on your website, contact an expert to install ADA compliance software. Your business can rest assured that it’s meeting ADA standards and reaching a larger audience.

Verify Your Terms and Agreements are Updated and Correct

Another software you want to make sure you have on your website is Termageddon. This software helps keep your website up to date with privacy policies which vary greatly from state to state. In fact, almost a dozen states have proposed or implemented privacy laws and proposed fines such as $5,000 per visitor for businesses that fail to comply.

If you want to make sure that your business is following the constantly changing laws and regulations, then using Termageddon is a great idea. According to their website, “Termageddon is a generator of policies for websites and applications. When the law changes, so do the policies, keeping your company protected and allowing you to focus on more important things”. Get Termageddon for your business.

Optimize Your Website to Increase Business

To increase your website’s traffic and conversion, it’s important to set up a website optimization plan. While not all of these options include software, this option is still important to mention when you’re looking to invest in your marketing. Improving your website with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which covers a variety of topics like page speed, keywords, and phrases monitoring, general UI/UX improvements, and more. Through SEO you can improve the overall score and ranking of your website, generating more traffic flow.

Page speeds are one of the factors that can seriously hurt your website. Slow pages not only earn your website negative rankings from search engines, but visitors will rarely wait for slow pages and instead will exit the page. This quick exit is called bounce, and high bounce rates are another factor that negatively affects page ranking. By updating and simplifying back-end code, optimizing images, and other page speed tricks you can improve website speed and SEO.

Monitoring your keywords and phrases is another important part of SEO. Including keywords and phrases in website headers and titles will help your page rank better for those terms. Making sure that you are organically using the terms throughout the website content also improves SEO.

Don’t forget the Meta-tags and descriptions, the information search engine crawlers use to read and evaluate your page. Another great way to start optimizing your SEO is to write industry-specific content using your keywords and phrases. Unsure what your keywords and phrases should be? There are free tools like AnswerThePublic.com that can help you.

Website optimization should also include analyzing the user’s experience in general. Is your website organized in a logical way that makes information easily accessible? Are your Call-to-Actions used where they are needed? Is your information up to date and accurate, including displaying any certifications or awards your business has won?

Keeping your website up to date and improving the design will draw more traffic to your website and keep them there longer. This overtime will improve your website’s search engine ranking and increase traffic levels. Website optimization is a key factor in improving your SEO to increase business.


Choosing an Expert Agency Partner to Handle Your Marketing Improvements

As you can see there is a TON of software and platform options to help you improve your website. The question becomes which ones does your business need, what can it afford, and will you be able to successfully implement the changes. You don’t want to install new software and fail to fully leverage it to your advantage. Partial success isn’t what you are looking for. When it comes to getting the most from software, both implementation, and management, it might be better to choose an agency partner. They understand the best marketing technology needed to make your business successful, and they’ve likely used them before.

An expert digital marketing agency partner can help you review your website and business to determine what your priorities should be. They can help develop a plan to address your current pain points and improve overall performance. With their insight, you can be confident that you aren’t missing opportunities, or buying something that you don’t actually need. It’s important to find an agency that not only specializes in digital marketing but web design as well. This way they can help you optimize both your website and marketing technology.

Idea Marketing Group, Experts in Digital Marketing and Web Design

Idea Marketing Group, Experts in Marketing Software to improve business performance

Our team works closely with clients to understand their business and design a strategy to optimize results. By choosing an expert team you can quickly and correctly implement marketing strategies that will have a major impact on your business efforts. Past clients have seen direct results in as little as a few weeks. Choosing a marketing agency partner like Idea is the best choice to make a serious improvement in your marketing strategy. Check out our portfolio of past marketing and web design projects.

Idea Marketing Group is one of the top digital agencies in Chicago known for web design and development. Since 2009, we have built hundreds of websites and managed marketing campaigns reaching millions of people for top brands and businesses throughout the nation. Our services include branding, strategy, UI/UX design, content marketing, search engine optimization, website support, and digital advertising. Everything a website needs to dominate in search rankings. We are consistently rated as a top web design agency by Clutch.co.